Burned (29 page)

There was a
thread connecting me to Taggart too, but it was James my attention
was pulled towards even as I killed the enforcer at my feet. The
thread to James was the biggest around of any of them, and his
reservoir was big—just like the reservoirs of all of the
hybrids I was connected to, but there was more to it than that. He
was nearly full to the brim with energy, but I could feel something
balancing on the edge of becoming something else.

More power
flowed down the link between us, and I felt it get that much closer
to becoming that other thing. A group of wolves came racing around
the inside of the wall, and I was momentarily forced to extend my
ability out to them, cutting their legs out from under them in an
effort to buy Jasmin and the others time to fall back to Carson.

The surge of
power coming into me was too much, and I felt my ability momentarily
short out, but not before James' reservoir hit some critical mass.
James stumbled and went down on one knee, and I knew that I'd just
killed him without meaning to. He was still breathing, his heart was
still beating, but I'd just created the opening Brandon had been
waiting for. He moved forward to dispatch James, and there was
nothing I could do to stop him.

Taggart and the
others threw themselves at Brandon with renewed energy, but he beat
them all back, and then there was nothing between him and James but
the tawny body of a wolf that had come out of nowhere to throw
herself at Brandon. I was too far away to be able to confirm the
identity of the wolf, but I didn't need to be able to see her to know
that it was Addison.

Brandon tore
her out of the air in a shower of blood, and continued forward intent
on killing James, but James wasn't where he'd been a split second
earlier. James spun to the side and slammed his fist home into
Brandon's side with a force that lifted Brandon up and threw him into
the wall.

It was an
impossible blow—not just the strength of it, but the speed. I'd
known James since before he'd become a hybrid, and I'd never seen him
move that quickly. He followed up his initial strike with a series of
attacks that were nothing more than a blur to me. The only time I'd
ever seen anything even remotely like that had been when Brandon had
been fighting the Ancients down in Mexico.

James wasn't
the equal of Brandon—nobody living was—but the margin of
difference had just shrunk down to the point where few beings who
weren't as fast as them could have hoped to tell them apart.

Brandon scored
several deep blows against James, but he didn't manage a killing
strike, and that was unheard of. Nobody had stood against him in
single combat since before he'd first manifested his power. Brandon
surged forward in an attempt to end the fight and dispatch James, but
now James' allies had arrived and Brandon was being driven backwards.

The hybrids all
around me were struggling back to their feet, and for the next
several seconds my attention was fully occupied with trying to keep
myself alive. Carson and a few others fought their way to my side,
and for a long eternity we all traded blows with our adversaries in
an endless round of violence.

Somewhere along
the way I realized that I was using both arms, that my ribs didn't
hurt, but there was no time to wonder at the miraculous healing I'd
experienced. One of my opponents hit me with enough force to send me
reeling backwards, and I was convinced I was going to die right up
until the Coun'hij enforcers started falling to invisible foes. Heath
had just arrived with help.

I stepped back
as a horde of bodies—some seen and others still
invisible—pushed past me, eager to get in on the final kills. A
scream brought me around in time to see Adri fall to the ground. I
crossed the distance between us without even considering if I should
be focused elsewhere. Despite everything else that had happened, part
of me was still more concerned about her than almost anything else.

A battle still
raged around us, but less than five feet from her were the bloody
remains of the fallen angel, and it was obvious that we were going to
win. Adri was kneeling between Taggart on one side and James on the
other, and her sobs precluded anything approaching speech.

Both men had
shifted back to human form because of their wounds, which was never a
good thing. It meant that they didn't have long. Their wounds were
bad enough that I was surprised that they'd lasted this long.

I didn't
realize that I'd shifted back to human form until I took each of
their hands in mine. Their body temperature had both already started
to plummet, but I didn't try to administer first aid—their
injuries were mostly internal, the kind of thing that even a surgeon
couldn't have fixed in the time they had left.

James was
trying to say something, but struggling to breathe past the blood. I
leaned down close enough to hear him and my heart dropped as I
realized he was asking about his mother. I didn't have the heart to
tell him that she was already dead—resting less than a dozen
feet from us.

"I've
never seen anything like it." Vicki was standing at my back.
"The two of them chased
Brandon Worthingfield
off and
then crashed into the damn angel like it was just any other enemy. I
tried to get in there to save them, but there just weren't any
openings. The wings provided it with too much coverage."

I nodded. "I
suspect that they knew that—they were trying to create that
opening for you. They knew that it had tied too many of our people up
for too long, people we needed over on the other side of the battle.
It looks like you managed to get it though. It's a relief knowing
that it's gone. There will be one fewer of those things that we'll
have to deal with in the future."

"You don't
think it's the only one of its kind, do you?"

I shook my
head. "The only way it would be the last of its kind is if
there's something else out there that's even more scary hunting them
down. There are more of them, and at least some of them are allied
with the Coun'hij. We're going to run into them again, which means
that we're going to have to find a better way of fighting them."

Vicki looked
down at my arm and did a double-take. "How did you heal that so
quickly? I thought it would be days still before you'd be moving
around without wincing at every step."

"I'm not
sure. It's a good thing though—I would have been dead a dozen
times over out there without the use of both arms. I…"

I suddenly had
a suspicion how I'd done it. I reached out to the closest pocket of
fighting and brought all of the shape shifters to their knees.
Enforcers, Tucson pack members, Isaac's people, my people, I hit all
of them with my power without even pausing to consider the fact that
I wasn't sure if my ability was still working.

I sucked down a
torrent of power as intense as anything else I'd ever accessed, and
this time I didn't let it just flow down the threads as it willed. I
reached out to the threads that were still rich and vibrant, and I
pinched them off, forcing the energy into the fading threads that led
into Taggart and James.

Their threads
resisted the energy—there was no capacity in the fraying
vessels inside of them, but I refused to be thwarted. I poured
energy, poured life into them and seconds passed by as pain-filled
hours until I saw the bones underneath their skin start to shift back
into place. James started breathing again, and the hole in Taggart's
chest sealed itself, flesh surging upwards until there wasn't even a
scar left.

It was good,
but it wasn't enough. I reached for more, pulling in more and more of
the people around me. The ocean of energy raging through my body
threatened to consume me. It felt as though the rift that was the
interior manifestation of my ability was going to tear free of the
fleshy moorings that made it part of me, but I forced it wider open
in an exercise of pure will and sent the resulting power racing
outward, exploring the limits of my new domain, the invisible realm
that comprised individual universes of possibility.

People started
fainting on all sides. Some of them lost consciousness from having
their vitality drained away, some of them lost consciousness from
having too much power forced into them, but still I pushed.

I reached the
end of the network of golden threads. None of them were like James,
teetering on the edge of a transformation to something else. I pushed
energy into the ones that were hurt, and then grabbed all of the
remaining energy and tried to push it into Addison.

I owed James.
It had been my fault that he'd stumbled and his mother had been
forced to sacrifice herself, I needed to bring her back. I continued
to suck down more energy at the same time that I crimped the golden
threads. I kept hoping that if I built up enough of a voltage
differential the energy would jump from me to Addison, but it
stubbornly refused to respond to my will. Something inside of me
started to tear, and then I lost my grip on everything and the energy
shot outward from me to all of my people and I lost consciousness.

Alec Graves
The Socorro Motel
Tucson, Arizona

We won, not
that I was conscious to see the last of our enemies put down. I woke
up an hour later inside of my RV surrounded by a combination of
wounded and unconscious individuals. Rachel hurried over to check on
me when she saw that I was awake, but I waved her off. Physically I
was fine.

I made my way
outside and found that we'd returned to the motel where Vicki's
people had been stationed. It was Vicki who was waiting for me, which
shouldn't have surprised me. She'd been close enough to me not to get
caught up in my ability when I'd started draining people, and she
hadn't been connected to me by one of the golden threads, so she'd
avoided being affected by the backlash of all that power at the very
end.

"We've got
things under control now. As people wake up I'm sending them out to
establish a perimeter. If Brandon shows back up he'll encounter stiff
resistance, but I have to admit that I'm glad to see you up and
about. I've never been completely confident that I could take him by
myself. With you back in the picture to drain away some of that
unnatural energy, my chances of taking him down are a lot better."

I grunted. "I
don't think Brandon will be coming back. They didn't expect to lose
today. Brandon isn't going to come back against us unless he's
confident he can win. He'll fight against terrible odds when he has
to, but having James stand against him like that will have unnerved
him. I don't suppose we managed to get Vincent?"

"No. Once
Brandon realized he was outclassed he pulled back over the wall with
a core of his most trusted people. Vincent was one of the ones who
got away."

"How many
did we lose?"

"About a
third, but we lost a lot fewer than we should have and we killed
several times as many as we lost. What's left of the Tucson pack will
go a long way towards replacing the people we lost."

I shook my
head. "Not replacing. Replenishing our numbers, yes, but nobody
is going to replace the ones we lost. What about Ulrich? He can't
hope to remain on the fence—not now, not after Brandon and his
people saw you."

She gave me a
sad smile. "I've been disavowed. As much as Ulrich would have
liked to be able to keep me around, I'm a liability now. If anyone
asks, he and Shawn will say that I and my men were part of a splinter
group inside of Shawn's movement, one that was trying to make the
world think that the Chicago pack had sent me as a way of forcing
Ulrich's hand."

"Kaleb
will know that's a lie."

"Yep, but
they won't risk going after him for it. The Coun'hij is going to be
running scared right now. The majority of the people they just lost
were hybrids from bootlicker packs, but they still lost a ton of
enforcers. They are going to be trumpeting Ulrich's continued
neutrality as proof that they haven't lost control of things."

"Ulrich is
playing a very risky game. I wouldn't put it past Puppeteer to decide
that he needs to be taken out regardless, and when that happens the
last thing he and Shawn are going to want is for me to doubt their
true loyalty."

That made Vicki
mad, but I'd known it would even before I'd said it. There was no
gold thread connecting her and me—Ulrich might have officially
cut her loose and told her to play the part of one of my people, but
she was still Shawn's woman—would always be his. I'd said what
I'd said because I wanted her to pass that message on to Ulrich and
Shawn.

Vicki saw
Jaclyn and Isaac approaching, and used that as a reason to leave. I
nodded a greeting.

"Are the
two of you ready to swear fealty to me?"

Jaclyn didn't
even wait for the words to fade away before she shook her head. "I'll
be joining Isaac's group. He's got plenty of experience running a
team with disparate power levels while keeping them under the
Coun'hij's radar."

I should have
known better. Jaclyn didn't have a thread connecting her to me. There
was no loyalty there. Isaac on the other hand was connected to me by
a thin filament of gold.

"I'm
surprised, Isaac. I know that our history isn't without hiccups, but
you of all people know how dangerous things are going to get if we
continue to operate as separate groups. You've got Heath in your
court, and Jaclyn too apparently, but there is only so much the two
of them can do if Kaleb or one of the others decides that he wants
your heads on a platter."

Isaac shifted
uncomfortably. "I'm sorry, Alec. If it were strictly up to me,
I'd fold my people into your organization and back your play, but
it's not just my call. I owe it to my people to see things through
with them, and a lot of them don't like the way that you used them as
some kind of metaphysical power source to heal James and Taggart.
Your people walked away without so much as a bruise, while many of my
people are going to be limping for days. They don't think it's fair."